Page 16 of Dominion's Guard
Margot would give me what I need if I asked through the right channels. She's already cooperating with Rapier Strategic's investigation, and she trusts me enough to extendthat cooperation. But anything I get from her informally is inadmissible, and every step I take down that road pushes me further off the books on a case my captain just told me to bury.
The coffee goes cold while I think. Then I do what I should have done yesterday.
I spend the rest of the afternoon on the phone, working every business within a couple of blocks of the parking garage. My badge and a vague reference to a "neighborhood security audit" give me enough cover to ask questions without tying the calls to a case I've been ordered to drop: restaurants, a dry cleaner, a cell phone repair shop, a small law office that keeps odd hours. Most of them run basic systems that record to local hard drives and overwrite weekly. Those are useless. But three of them use cloud-based platforms with remote access, and every one of those three tells me the same story.
The dry cleaner lost footage overnight and his tech guy can't explain it. The law office had their cloud provider flag an unauthorized remote login during the early morning hours, and their recordings from midnight to six are gone. The cell phone repair shop owner is the one who cracks it open: his provider already sent him a diagnostic showing someone accessed his system remotely, purged the stored footage, and reset it to default. The whole thing took minutes.
Three businesses with three different providers all point to the same window, the same method, the same ghost.
Whoever killed Lawrence didn't just wipe the parking garage. They blinded a multi-block radius, every cloud-based system that might have caught a vehicle entering or leaving during the killing. The local hard drives they left alone, either because they couldn't reach them remotely or because the weekly overwrite would bury the footage on its own. This goes beyond covering tracks. Someone mapped every camera in the area before the first shot and had the technical reach to shut them down froma distance. The operation was planned, resourced, and executed with a discipline that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
I close my laptop and call Remy.
He picks up on the second ring. "Broussard."
"I need to coordinate with your team on the Renata situation. If I’m going to be able to get my captain to let the investigation go forward, I’m going to have to assure him that NOPD and Rapier Strategic aren't stepping on each other."
The lie is clean enough for Remy to be able to overlook it as he’s pragmatic enough to take the opening I'm offering. He knows I've been working this case. He knows my captain is the kind of man who buries what he can't solve. The coordination angle gives us both a reason to talk that doesn't require admitting I've been ordered to stop.
Rapier Strategic took this on because Margot asked her brothers, and Remy doesn't answer to NOPD, which means any information he shares is a gift I can't compel and shouldn't take for granted.
"What do you need?" Remy asks.
"The parking garage camera wipe extended beyond the garage itself. Multiple businesses in the area had their systems hit in the same window. Same method, same timing. Whoever did this has serious technical resources and knew exactly which systems to target."
Remy is quiet for a beat. "That's a level of preparation that suggests prior surveillance of the area."
"That's what I'm thinking. Someone mapped the camera coverage around that garage before the killing, which means this wasn't opportunistic. They chose that location because they knew how to blind it."
"Renata parks there every night," Remy says. The implication sits between us. "Same level, same spot."
"I'm aware."
The silence that follows carries the weight of what neither of us says out loud. If the killer chose that garage because they'd already mapped its surveillance coverage, they'd been in the area long enough to know who else uses it. Long enough to know Renata's routine. Long enough to know she'd be walking through the ground level at three in the morning after her shift.
"I'd like to talk to her," I say. "In person."
"She's at her apartment. The detail's been on her since Saturday."
"Has she cooperated with the detail?"
Another pause. Remy chooses his words with the care of a man who protects information the way other people protect assets. "There's been a complication. I'd rather you hear the details from the detail on scene."
The phrasing tells me two things: something went wrong, and Remy wants me to see it firsthand rather than filter it through a phone call. I file it and move on. "I'd like to come by after shift. Text me a time that works for your team."
"I'll let the detail know."
The call ends. I finish the cold coffee, toss the cup, and drive back to the precinct to close out the afternoon on Fontenot's case. The warrant comes through before the end of shift. Fontenot's pleased. Hebert nods his approval from his office doorway as I pass. The machinery of police work grinds forward on cases with bodies and evidence and clean sight lines from crime to arrest.
I leave the precinct after shift and drive to the Irish Channel.
The route is one I've driven enough times that my hands know the turns without my brain getting involved, which leaves room to think. The evening is warm for October, the air through my cracked window thick with the particular combination of river water, frying oil, and jasmine that the Irish Channelproduces when the humidity drops low enough to let individual scents separate. A few blocks from Renata's building, someone is playing brass on a porch, a trombone running through a melody I almost recognize before it dissolves into improvisation.
I think about Renata while I drive. I'm not thinking about the case, or the investigation, or the evidence I don't have.
I think about the woman herself, because the woman is the key to everything and I've been circling the perimeter of who she really is since the first night I sat at her bar and watched her build a Sazerac with hands that moved like they'd been trained for precision work that had nothing to do with cocktails.
She's been avoiding me for more than a year and I've let her, because patience is a tool and I use it the way I use everything else: deliberately, with full awareness of what it costs and what it earns.
